PRESS RELEASE
Under strict embargo until 22/09/2020
Royal College of Music and Community Jameel establish Hardship Fund to support students in need
• The new fund will support students for whom financial hardship might be a barrier to studying at the world-class institution • The fund is next stage of an ongoing relationship between the Royal College of Music and global philanthropy Community Jameel
Tuesday 22 September 2020 – Today, the Royal College of Music (RCM) has announced the establishment of the Community Jameel Hardship Fund to support RCM students who are experiencing unexpected difficulty or financial hardship, for an initial period of three years.
The new fund represents a continuation of the RCM’s relationship with the global philanthropy Community Jameel, which in November 2019 saw the launch of a scholarship supported by Community Jameel and the Andrea Bocelli Foundation.
The Community Jameel Hardship Fund will be used to support RCM students who are experiencing unexpected financial difficulty and all students are eligible to apply.
The first Jameel Scholar to be supported by the Community Jameel Hardship Fund for the 2020/21 academic year is Tunisian violinist Bacem Anas Romdhani. Having graduated from the RCM with a Masters in 2020, Bacem Anas Romdhani will study for an Artist Diploma.
Professor Colin Lawson, Director of the RCM, comments: ‘I am enormously grateful on behalf of everyone at the Royal College of Music for Community Jameel’s continued support of our students. In what has been an immensely challenging year, Community Jameel’s generous gift will have a significant impact for those who have unexpectedly found themselves facing financial hardship. The RCM has a long history of philanthropic support which provides greater access to our world-leading education.’
Mohammed Jameel KBE, Founder of Community Jameel, said: ‘At Community Jameel, we are committed to supporting access to quality musical education, particularly for students from the Arab world, a region with a long-standing tradition of producing world-class composers, conductors and performers, and home to opera houses, concert halls and orchestras. ‘Through the Community Jameel Hardship Fund, we are proud to be partnering again with the Royal College of Music to support students facing financial difficulties, and assisting international students from the Arab world to attend one of the world’s best conservatoires.’
This Hardship Fund continues the support of Community Jameel for the institutions of South Kensington, including the Jameel Gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Jameel Institute at Imperial College, and the Bocelli-Jameel Scholarship at the RCM.
Any surplus in the fund will provide scholarship support for international students, with a preference for students from the Arab world.
More than 50% of current Royal College of Music students have received financial support during their studies through scholarships and awards, thanks to the generosity of a variety of charitable trusts, companies, businesses, individual members of the public and legacies. More information can be found at www.rcm.ac.uk/support.
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For more information, please contact:
Talia Hull, Director of Communications, [email protected]
Tash Payne, Communications Officer, [email protected]
Notes to editors
About the Royal College of Music
Founded in 1883, the Royal College of Music (RCM) is a world leading music conservatoire with a prestigious history and contemporary outlook. Our 800 undergraduate and postgraduate students come from over 55 countries and are taught in a dynamic environment, leaving the RCM to become the outstanding performers, conductors and composers of the future.
For the fifth consecutive year in 2020, the RCM was ranked as the top institution in the UK for the Performing Arts in the QS World University Rankings. RCM was also ranked the top UK conservatoire for music in The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2019 and top music conservatoire for overall student satisfaction in the 2018 National Student Satisfaction (NSS) Survey according to the Times Higher Education.
RCM professors are leaders in their fields and, under such expert guidance, RCM students regularly achieve remarkable success around the globe.
Among our alumni are composers and performers such as Sir Hubert Parry, Benjamin Britten, Gustav Holst, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Lord Lloyd Webber, Rebecca Clarke, Anna Meredith, Clemency Burton-Hill, Dame Joan Sutherland, Dame Sarah Connolly, Gerald Finley, Sophie Bevan, Louise Alder, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Mark-Anthony Turnage and Sir Thomas Allen.
Regular visitors to the RCM include Bernard Haitink, Sir Thomas Allen, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Alina Ibragimova and Lang Lang. Our recent honorary doctorates include Sir Antonio Pappano, Jonas Kaufmann, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Sir Roger Norrington, Sir Bryn Terfel, Steve Reich and Maxim Vengerov (Polonsky Visiting Professor of Violin). www.rcm.ac.uk
About Community Jameel
Community Jameel is a global philanthropy with the mission to innovate for a better future. It continues the tradition of supporting communities started by the late Abdul Latif Jameel in Jeddah in 1945. This year marks 75 years since that tradition began and Community Jameel now works across six major fields of development: livelihoods, the arts, education, health, climate, and evidence. Community Jameel is active worldwide, directly implementing programmes and collaborating with major international institutions and grassroots organisations to help solve the challenges facing the world today. www.communityjameel.org